BY 2050, our Sun is expected to be unusually cool.
It’s what scientists have termed a ‘grand minimum’ — a particularly low point in what is otherwise a steady 11-year cycle.
Over this cycle, the Sun’s tumultuous heart races and rests.
At its high point, the nuclear fusion at the Sun’s core forces more magnetic loops high into its boiling atmosphere — ejecting more ultraviolet radiation and generating sunspots and flares.
When it’s quiet, the Sun’s surface goes calm.
It ejects less ultraviolet radiation…. in the 17th Century … an intense cold snap between 1645 and 1715 has been dubbed the “Maunder Minimum”.
In England, the Thames river froze over. The Baltic Sea was covered in ice — so much so that the Swedish army was able to march across it to invade Denmark in 1658….
Now physicist Dan Lubin at the University of California San Diego has calculated an estimate of how much dimmer the Sun is likely to be when the next such grand minimum takes place.
His team’s study, Ultraviolet Flux Decrease Under a Grand Minimum from IUE Short-wavelength Observation of Solar Analogs, has been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
It finds the Sun is likely to be 7 per cent cooler than its usual minimum.
And another grand minimum is likely to be just decades away, based on the cooling spiral of recent solar cycles….
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